Laid-Back Ambition

Bubblegum-pop princess. Entrepreneur. Prime-time TV host. How Rochelle Humes became the soft-sell master of reinvention

- Catriona Innes

The time is 2pm, it’s a Friday afternoon and Rochelle Humes has said the word “penis” three times in the past five minutes. She’s recounting a recent interview with a man who got fillers to make his bigger. “He originally called the salon for hair plugs!” she says, peeling into giggles.

This is not how I expected the conversation to go. Humes was, after all, one-fifth of The Saturdays – the UK’s answer to Fifth Harmony. Interviews with the band were largely what you expected from a frothy, manufactured pop group: friendship, beauty routines, fashion… the sort of PR-friendly “safe” topics that are designed to keep girl groups as uniformly bland as possible. Unique personalities are not part of the girl-group formula (with, perhaps, the exception of the Spice Girls). One star should never burn brighter than the other. And yet…